Slow Fade

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood.

Fitzgerald, in his own words, “just couldn’t make the grade as a hack.”Credit BARRY BLITT

“Dear Scott: I don’t know where you are living and I’ll be damned if I believe anyone lives in a place called ‘The Garden of Allah,’ ” Thomas Wolfe wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald, in July of 1937. Wolfe sent his letter “c/o Charles Scribner’s Sons,” knowing that their editor, Maxwell Perkins, would forward it to Fitzgerald wherever he might be. Fitzgerald was, in fact, living at the Garden of Allah, a bungalow colony on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, along with Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, S. J. Perelman, Ogden Nash, and other writers in the screen trade. He had arrived earlier that month to take a job at the M-G-M studio in Culver City. He occupied a small office on the third floor of the writers’ building, where from ten in the morning until six at night he worked on scripts and drank bottles of Coca-Cola, carefully arranging the empties around the room. Fitzgerald lasted eighteen months at M-G-M, during which time he worked on five scripts, wrote another one more or less from scratch, and generated a pile of notes and memos. And if his work was altered or rejected, he’d follow up with bitter, self-justifying letters.

There was a spate of such letters. Fitzgerald, to put it mildly, did not impress the studio bosses. The rap against him was that he couldn’t make the shift from words on the page to images on the screen. His plotting was elaborate without purpose; his dialogue arch or sentimental; and his tone too serious—at times, even grim. Billy Wilder, who seemed genuinely fond of Fitzgerald, likened him to “a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job”—with no idea how to connect the pipes and make the water flow.

On the face of it, he should have taken Hollywood by storm: he wrote commercially successful stories; he knew how to frame a scene; and his dialogue, at least in his best fiction, was smart, sophisticated, evocative. And of all the American novelists writing in the nineteen-twenties and thirties—Dreiser, Lewis, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck—Fitzgerald had the strongest attachment to Hollywood. As a boy, he was a passionate moviegoer; he directed and acted in plays, and his desk was filled, he later recalled, with “dozens of notebooks containing the germs of dozens of musical comedies.” Moreover, three of his early stories had been made into silent films, as had his novels “The Beautiful and Damned” and “The Great Gatsby.” Fitzgerald began trying to write for the movies as early as 1922, and yet, for all his efforts, he earned exactly one screen credit: a shared billing on “Three Comrades.” So what was the problem?

Five years ago, Fitzgerald’s Hollywood career came in for a new round of scrutiny, when the University of South Carolina paid four hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars for the bulk of his M-G-M output. The material had gathered dust in the M-G-M archives until an employee named Martin Kraegel salvaged it, in the early seventies, when the company began to consolidate its assets. Kraegel then sat on the documents (around two thousand pages, some in pencilled longhand) for another three decades before attempting to sell them. But there was a complication. Strictly speaking, he didn’t own the papers; at any rate, he didn’t own the intellectual rights to them. Nor, as it turned out, did the Fitzgerald estate. Lawyers determined that, since the manuscripts had been generated as “work for hire,” such rights belonged to Time Warner, which had bought Turner Broadcasting System in 1996, which, in turn, had owned M-G-M’s film library since 1986.

Enter Matthew J. Bruccoli, industrious collector of all things Fitzgeraldian, who, for nearly forty years, until his death, in 2008, taught at the University of South Carolina. Bruccoli authenticated the papers and, in April, 2004, helped broker a deal bringing them to the university, where—christened the “Warner Bros./Turner Entertainment F. Scott Fitzgerald Screenplay Collection”—they reside in the Thomas Cooper Library.

Although a number of writers have addressed Fitzgerald’s time in Hollywood, his biographers have generally given short shrift to the screenplays—the assumption being that he wrote them for the money. You bet he did—as did Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner, Anthony Powell, P. G. Wodehouse, Aldous Huxley, and half a dozen other literary luminaries—but for Fitzgerald it wasn’t just about the money. According to Charles Marquis Warren, Fitzgerald’s collaborator on a screen treatment of “Tender Is the Night,” “Scott would rather have written a movie than the Bible, than a best-seller.” This overstates the case, but Fitzgerald was certainly the first American novelist to take the movies seriously and the first to regard his own talent as a natural fit with Hollywood. One might also add that his life exemplified that all-too-neat reversal of fortune of which Hollywood studios were so fond.

No American writer before Fitzgerald had achieved success so young or fallen from favor quite so quickly. Born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota, he entered Princeton University in 1913, but did not graduate; he joined the Army in 1917, but never made it overseas; and then, like Byron, nearly a century earlier, he awakened one morning to find himself famous. His first novel, “This Side of Paradise” (1920), featuring sensitive Ivy League students, struck a chord, when chords still vibrated to bobbed hair and petting. In the nineteen-twenties, he and his wife, the mercurial Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, romped through the capitals of Europe, seemingly with a highball in either hand. The twenties were Fitzgerald’s decade, a moment when the nation, as he put it, “was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.” He dubbed that spree the Jazz Age, and he and Zelda were forever associated with its lavish parties, bathtub gin, and cloche-hatted flappers.

Part of our fascination with Fitzgerald involves his fall from grace. The Depression repudiated not only the Jazz Age but also the writer most associated with it. The man who commanded between three thousand and four thousand dollars for a short story as late as 1930 was forgotten by the reading public six years later; in 1936, his total book royalties amounted to just over eighty dollars. Money problems were the least of it. In the early thirties, his fourth attempt at a novel (about a cameraman who dreams of being a director), which eventually became “Tender Is the Night” (about a psychiatrist who behaves like a director), was giving him fits. He was drinking too much and popping pills both to sleep and to wake up. His marriage was deteriorating—Zelda suffered a mental breakdown in 1930, and was in and out of sanitariums for the rest of her life—and in November, 1935, he bolted to Hendersonville, North Carolina, where he took a room in a hotel and began writing three confessional articles for Esquire (posthumously included in “The Crack-Up”), which horrified his friends and further damaged his reputation. Finally, there was the disastrous interview he gave to the New York Post, on his fortieth birthday, which made him sound like a drunken, unstable has-been.

Hollywood was his last chance: if he could establish himself in the film industry, then maybe his health, his confidence, and his creative juices would return. Twice before he had made the trip West: the first time in 1927, when he considered himself “a sort of magician with words,” and again, in 1931, when he was asked to adapt a popular novel of the day. Neither venture had panned out, and Fitzgerald returned East, feeling thwarted by studio bigwigs. Part of his problem with Hollywood had to do with the man he admired most in the industry: Irving Thalberg, the wunderkind who ran Universal City at the age of twenty-one, and M-G-M four years later. Thalberg was responsible for the assembly-line method of screenwriting—successive teams of writers tweaking the same story—which incensed Fitzgerald. Most writers, apart from a few script-savvy specialists like Ben Hecht and Anita Loos, were considered cogs in the machine, or, in Jack Warner’s gracious phrase, “schmucks with Underwoods.” Fitzgerald returned the compliment. “I hate the place like poison with a sincere hatred,” he wrote to his agent, Harold Ober, in 1935. By 1937, however, adrift and miserable, he was desperate to return.

But Hollywood was in no hurry to have him back. It was only through the intercession of an old friend that M-G-M hired him—at a thousand dollars per week, for six months. Though he was, as he later put it, “a pretty broken and prematurely old man who hasn’t a penny except what he can bring out of a weary mind and sick body,” Fitzgerald boarded the train to Los Angeles with an optimistic step. He had a plan. Fitzgerald always had a plan. He liked to draw up schedules; he kept meticulous records; he made numerous lists; and he recorded every penny earned, borrowed, and paid back. For a man who led one of the messiest lives in literary history, on paper he was as organized as Felix Unger’s sock drawer. “I must be very tactful but keep my hand on the wheel,” he wrote to his daughter, Scottie, from the train. “Find out the key man among the bosses + the most malleable among the collaborators. Given a break I can make them double this contract in less than two years.”

Despite his previous experiences, Fitzgerald still felt there must be a trick to writing a good screenplay. So he familiarized himself with the logistical bric-a-brac of camera movements, and watched popular films, like “A Star Is Born,” over and over, pinpointing every single shot, and typing up his findings, two columns per page, until he had seven pages of:

GROUP SHOT MED. TWO SHOT

CLOSE UP CLOSE SHOT

TWO SHOT CLOSE SHOT

GROUP SHOT CLOSE SHOT

CLOSE SHOT CLOSE UP

I came across this singular inventory when I visited the Thomas Cooper Library, at the University of South Carolina, early in September. I wanted to see for myself what Fitzgerald had been up to in La-La Land, and, as I sat in a temperature-controlled room on the mezzanine floor, examining the documents liberated from M-G-M’s basement, I discovered just how hard he had worked at his craft. Fitzgerald approached each assignment with an intensity that must have puzzled his superiors. Given a script to revise, he would break it down, backstory it, advise the producers of its potential, and then start to add layers. “A Yank at Oxford” couldn’t be just an innocent romance; it had to probe the connection between language and mores. “Madame Curie” couldn’t be just the story of a woman overcoming the odds; it had to reveal the intricacies of a marriage between equals. Naturally, he became emotionally invested in the work, making it difficult to cede control, and, like the British colonel in “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” he forgot that what he was building didn’t belong to him, and, consequently, felt dismayed at its destruction.

Fitzgerald began his final screenwriting stint by writing “behind” another writer on “A Yank at Oxford,” or, as Meyer Wolfsheim would say, “Oggsford.” At some point, two other writers took over and jettisoned much of his dialogue. He was then handed a screenplay-in-progress of Erich Maria Remarque’s popular novel “Three Comrades.” After submitting his draft to Joseph Mankiewicz—who later produced “The Philadelphia Story” and wrote and directed “All About Eve”—he learned that he would be paired with a more experienced screenwriter. Disappointed, he resigned himself to a collaboration, and for five months the two men worked together, not always collegially, until they had a finished script. Mankiewicz, however, remained unimpressed, and decided to take a hand. His changes horrified Fitzgerald, who shot off a letter:

To say I’m disillusioned is putting it mildly. For nineteen years, with two years out for sickness, I’ve written best-selling entertainment, and my dialogue is supposedly right up at the top. . . . I am utterly miserable at seeing months of work and thought negated in one hasty week. I hope you’re big enough to take this letter as it’s meant—a desperate plea to restore the dialogue to its former quality. . . . Oh, Joe, can’t producers ever be wrong? I’m a good writer—honest.

In 1938, “Three Comrades” was named one of the ten best films of the year, but Fitzgerald took no pleasure in this. He thought Mankiewicz a vulgarian who had traduced the spirit of Remarque’s novel and of his screenplay. Mankiewicz shrugged off Fitzgerald’s accusations. He even claimed never to have received the pitiful letter. It was only decades later, with the revival of critical interest in Fitzgerald, that Mankiewicz felt compelled to defend his actions. “I personally have been attacked as if I had spat on the American flag because it happened once that I rewrote some dialogue by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But indeed it needed it! . . . It was very literary dialogue, novelistic dialogue that lacked all the qualities required for screen dialogue.”

Despite Mankiewicz’s retouchings, Fitzgerald’s contract was extended for a year and his salary rose to twelve hundred and fifty dollars a week. “I am now considered a success in Hollywood,” he observed wryly, “because something which I did not write is going on under my name, and something which I did write has been quietly buried without any fuss or row—not even a squeak from me. The change from regarding this as a potential art to looking at it as a cynical business has begun. But I still think that some time during my stay out here I will be able to get something of my own on the screen that I can ask my friends to see.”

He thought that opportunity had arrived when he was asked to write a script about adultery for Joan Crawford. His screenplay “Infidelity’’ pleased neither his producer nor the censorship office, and the project was shelved (though someone briefly thought it might fly if it were renamed “Fidelity”). He then worked on “Marie Antoinette,” followed by an adaptation of Clare Boothe Luce’s “The Women,” neither of which he saw through to the end. He spent three months on “Madame Curie” (from a treatment by Aldous Huxley) and then, in early January, 1939, was lent out to David O. Selznick for a polish on “Gone with the Wind.” A week later, he was gone; M-G-M, meanwhile, without explanation, allowed his contract to lapse.

Fitzgerald initially resisted the idea that he was at fault. Somehow he managed to convince himself that screenwriting could be his métier and that he was capable of giving studio executives what they wanted. It was only toward the end of his life that he acknowledged that he “just couldn’t make the grade as a hack—that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.”

After leaving M-G-M, Fitzgerald went freelance, and was almost immediately teamed with the twenty-four-year-old screenwriter Budd Schulberg on a collegiate romance set during the annual Winter Carnival at Schulberg’s alma mater, Dartmouth. Unfortunately, on the research trip East, Schulberg brought along two bottles of Mumm’s for the flight, and by the time the two of them were over Kansas the writing was on the wall—which is to say that it never made it into a script. Fitzgerald drank practically the entire time they were in New York and Hanover and points in between; they were fired before they had even roughed out the story. Years later, Schulberg, who died last August, recounted their hapless collaboration in his novel “The Disenchanted” and also in an Esquire article that portrayed Fitzgerald as “tired, sick, embattled, vain and proud and painfully conscious of his fall from fame and fortune and creative productivity.”

During the spring of 1939, with the Dartmouth debacle weighing on him, Fitzgerald drank heavily, fought with his lover, the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, and took a chaotic trip to Cuba with Zelda, where he was beaten up for trying to stop a cockfight. He spent a week on the David Niven vehicle “Raffles,” but, with no steady movie work, he began writing stories about a hack screenwriter named Pat Hobby. Then, one day in March, 1940, an independent producer by the name of Lester Cowan called him. Cowan had bought the rights to Fitzgerald’s story “Babylon Revisited” and wanted Fitzgerald to turn it into a screenplay. Fitzgerald tailored the script, “Cosmopolitan,” for Shirley Temple, and then spent an afternoon pitching the idea to her mother.

When word got out that Temple was considering “Cosmopolitan,” Fitzgerald’s stock rose. Darryl Zanuck, at Twentieth Century Fox, hired him to revise a script of Emlyn Williams’s play “The Light of Heart.” Buoyed by such interest, Fitzgerald began to refer to “Cosmopolitan” as his “great hope for attaining some real status as a movie man and not a novelist.” “If I get a credit on either of these two last efforts,” he wrote in October, 1940, “things will never again seem so black as they did a year ago when I felt that Hollywood had me down in its books as a ruined man—a label which I had done nothing to deserve.” But Shirley Temple’s mother dithered, and “Cosmopolitan” died, and, in November, Zanuck passed on his revision of “The Light of Heart.”

Students of Fitzgerald’s Hollywood days, who insist on demonstrating his ineptness, inevitably fasten on a scene from his draft of “Three Comrades.” At one point, a young veteran, Bobby, places a call to a woman named Pat. As soon as Bobby recites the number, Fitzgerald cuts from his face to a celestial switchboard, where an angelic operator coos, “One moment, please—I’ll connect you with heaven.” We now cut to “St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, cackling: I think she’s in.” Back to: Bobby’s face, “changing to human embarrassment,” as Pat’s voice says “Hello.” An amusing conversation ensues between the awkward Bobby and the sophisticated Pat. We then cut to a satyr “who has replaced the angel at the switchboard, pulling out the plug with a sardonic expression.” As the writer Tom Dardis observes, although such a sequence might work nicely in an Ernst Lubitsch comedy, it seems rather misguided in a story set in a grim post-First World War Germany.

Because Fitzgerald took his work seriously, his pedagogical instinct would invariably kick in and he would end up overwriting and overexplaining. Consider a setup from “Cosmopolitan”:

88. LONG SHOT—THE SHIP DOCKING—shooting from the angle of those waiting on the pier. Band music loud and spirited.

89. BEHIND THE PICKET BARRIER

Pierre and Marion Petrie waiting in the crowd. He is a Frenchman with a military tradition that makes him pompous and ceremonious in his personality—but when he had taken off his uniform, back in 1919, it was apparent that nature had equipped him to be only a minor clerk.

“In 1919”? What sort of detail is that to put in a screenplay? Now follows a much longer, prosy summation of Marion Petrie’s character and attitudes, all of which could be expressed in a few lines of dialogue instead of lengthy paragraphs:

His wife Marion . . . is an extremely pretty American woman of thirty-two who must have hoped for a better match. She is now in a state of great emotion—barely controlled. She is agitated almost to the breaking point by the news of her sister’s suicide, which reached her last night in Paris. Always before this she has felt a certain secret jealousy of her sister, who has had great wealth and luxury.

Fitzgerald is not without his defenders. In “The Cinematic Vision of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Wheeler Winston Dixon, a professor of film at the University of Nebraska, contends that Fitzgerald developed “an adroit and engagingly complex visual sensibility” based on fluid camera movement and astute intercutting. Dixon’s case, however, rests entirely on “Infidelity,” which, admittedly, does emphasize the visual over the verbal. In fact, Fitzgerald went a little camera crazy with “Infidelity.” In his concern to register states of mind and the changing moods of a relationship, he has the camera constantly picking up and dropping off, trucking, panning, and shifting from a conventional two-shot to a P.O.V. shot. When two lovers suddenly realize they have been spotted, Fitzgerald insists that we see their reactions:

(Close-up of Iris: Her eyes look down, then look up again, then stare.

Two-shot of Iris and Nicolas. Nicolas looks up and sees Iris’s expression. As he starts to turn and see what she is staring at, the camera drops them and pans very slowly around the room, including the sideboard, passing it and reaching the door.

Althea, motionless, stands in the doorway, regarding them. We are seeing her in a medium shot from their angle and we hold on it for a moment.

Two-shot of Nicolas and Iris from Althea’s angle. Their faces are shocked and staring.

Medium shot of Althea from their angle. . . .)

And so on for another half-dozen lines of instruction before the parenthetical is complete. Although aspiring screenwriters are admonished to “see it” before describing it, they soon learn, if they’re lucky enough to get a script produced, that no amount of visualization on their part guides a director’s framing of a scene. Fitzgerald certainly visualized “Infidelity,” but, then again, his timing was sometimes off, and the script, which was never finished, relies excessively on flashbacks to convey a sense of what was lost. Fitzgerald could figuratively wield the camera, but usually he had too much to say to say it with a lens.

Fitzgerald wasn’t naïve about the business; he knew that movies were “a salaried affair and along architectural rather than emotional lines.” He also knew that screenwriting is an opaque craft requiring clarification by cameras and actors. Nevertheless, he couldn’t overcome his aversion to its bare-bones structure. When handed a script, he tackled it as a critic or an editor rather than as a mechanic; he wanted to redesign the car instead of just making it run better. The sad thing is, he tried: he tried faithfully to give the studios what they wanted, without quite realizing how short his attempts fell.

Every so often, though, he put together a sequence that you know would work perfectly onscreen. There’s a moment in “Cosmopolitan” when Victoria, a girl of eleven, having sneaked aboard a train heading for Switzerland, stumbles across a compartment occupied by a Circassian woman with three children. When a Swiss official asks to see the woman’s passport, the mother “begins jabbering in obscure double-talk,” and when he turns his attention to Victoria, who doesn’t have her passport, she “pretends to jabber, too, in a language exactly like theirs.” In an instant, Fitzgerald establishes the young girl’s smarts.

The difficulty in evaluating Fitzgerald as a screenwriter lies in the problematic nature of screenwriting itself. While really incompetent scripts are easy to spot, even a well-wrought screenplay is a poor predictor of either artistic or box-office success. A script is simply a blueprint, whose potential to be mediocre or brilliant lies outside the screenwriter’s purview. You can’t really tell what kind of tree will grow from the hundred-and-twenty-page acorn in your hands; too much depends on just about everything else—direction, cinematography, acting, music, editing. The unfinished nature of the form is, ultimately, what Fitzgerald could not abide. You can feel it in the prolixity of his scripts and in the dark grooves of his pencilled notes: he wanted every screenplay to impart a moral lesson while illuminating the hidden facets of its characters.

Fitzgerald’s scripts were hobbled by the same quality that lifted his fiction above the superficial: the complicated nature of his mind. He had started out thinking he had genius and a special destiny, and it was this belief in an ideal version of himself that, when transmuted into narrative form, won him both a wide audience and critical esteem. But that idealized self in all other respects eluded him, not because he drank too much or behaved badly but because he was a writer at war with his own inclinations. A self-professed “moralist at heart,” he also wanted to be a hero and an entertainer. Goethe looked out from one eye; Lorenz Hart from the other. Although he came to believe that “life is essentially a cheat . . . and that the redeeming things are not ‘happiness and pleasure’ but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle,” he always remained someone who depended to an unhealthy extent on the good opinion of others. And it was this dichotomy—the receptiveness to life’s most profound lessons coupled with a need to win over the world by the force of his personality—that made him capable of being, in equal measure, aesthetically rigid and blatantly manipulative.

In the end, Fitzgerald’s attitude to Hollywood was as inconsistent as his attitudes toward everything. The warring impulses in him never really subsided. He was alternately sensible and reckless; worldly and adolescent; down to earth and somewhere above Alpha Centauri. He said that he knew more about life in his books than he did in life, and he was right. In life, he simply wanted too much. He wanted to be both a great novelist and a Hollywood hot shot. He wanted to box like Gene Tunney and run downfield like Red Grange. He wanted to write songs like Cole Porter and poetry like John Keats. He wanted the trappings of wealth but was drawn to the social idealism of Marx. He wasn’t so much a walking contradiction as a quivering mass of dreams and ambitions that, depending on how he was feeling and whom he was talking to, created a dizzying array of impressions. Anita Loos noticed that people in Hollywood “treated him like an invalid,” and George Cukor found him “very grim, dim, slightly plump.” Anthony Powell, however, after having lunch with Fitzgerald in the M-G-M commissary, noticed “a schoolmasterish streak, if at the same time an attractive one; an enthusiasm, simplicity of exposition, that might have offered a career as a teacher or university don.” Fitzgerald’s own schoolmaster at Princeton, Christian Gauss, would not have been surprised by these disparate opinions. Fitzgerald, he said, reminded him of all the Karamazov brothers at once.

In Hollywood, the brothers were continually elbowing each other aside. One day, screenwriting could be a “tense crossword puzzle game . . . a surprisingly interesting intellectual exercise”; the next day, it might represent “a rankling indignity.” Unresolved feelings bubbled up in him to the very end: “Isn’t Hollywood a dump,” he wrote to a friend in 1940, “in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.” Sure it was—but it was also, as he well knew, part of the American character. It was Hollywood that lay stretched out before him when he jotted in his notes for “The Love of the Last Tycoon,” “I look out at it—and I think it is the most beautiful history in the world. It is the history of me and of my people. . . . It is the history of all aspiration—not just the American dream but the human dream and if I came at the end of it that too is a place in the line of the pioneers.”

Such words remind us that Fitzgerald drew his faith not from camera angles or even plotlines but from sentences; and what draws us powerfully to his work is the sensitive handling of emotional yearning and regret. When he was revising “Gatsby,” he characterized the burden of the novel as “the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.” As Arthur Mizener, Fitzgerald’s first biographer, pointed out, “It is precisely this loss which allows Gatsby to discover ‘what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.’ ” Perhaps Fitzgerald could have captured this heightened state of awareness in a script, but was this what the studios were looking for? Fitzgerald’s vision of becoming a great screenwriter was no more realistic than the likelihood of his returning a kickoff or writing a hit Broadway show. But, then, Fitzgerald was not one to give up on dreams; if he had, he could not have written so beautifully, so penetratingly, about their loss. ♦

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